------------------------------------------------------ Comments In Italian, case only appears in the pronouns. There are four types of pronouns that appear in Italian; nominative, accusative, dative and prepositional. The nominative case denotes an object that is the subject of the sentence. In Italian, these pronouns are io, tu, Lei, lei, lui, noi, voi, Loro and loro. The accusative case denotes objects that are receiving the action. These pronouns are mi, ti, La, la, lo, ci, vi, Le, li and le. The dative case is used to indicate the recipient of an action. The pronouns are mi, ti, Le, le, gli, ci, vi, Loro and loro. The prepositional pronouns only appear in prepositional phrases. They are me, te, Lei, lei, lui, noi, voi, Loro and loro. However, depending on your analysis of Italian pronouns, the dative and accusative pronouns could actually be considered inflections on the verb. In this analysis, I have decided to treat accusative and dative pronouns as inflections rather than separate words. 'objects that are receiving the action' sounds more like traditional grammar than linguistics. I'd go with 'object of the sentence' or 'direct object' instead. That makes the next sentence (datives are recipients) seem to make more sense, too :-) There are two methods of getting a noun into the accusative position for a verb. It can either undergo a lexical rule that changes its case to an accusative case or it can be left underspecified. If you leave it underspecified, it can be any case. This is a problem, since nouns can never be dative. Only pronouns and prepositional phrases can fulfill a dative argument on the verb. However, in this representation, dative pronouns are considered inflections, so in the end nothing is considered dative. Verb can be marked as only allowing prepositional phrases to fulfill its dative argument, and lexical rules can add the required inflection while fulfilling its requirement for a prepositional phrase. Since there no longer is a dative case, nouns can be left underspecified and can take on any case without worrying about accidentally becoming dative. This is done even though traditional Italian grammaticians have always placed dative as a case in Italian. Your way makes sense to me. Note: traditional grammarians, not grammaticians. Italian nouns agree with their determiners and adjectival modifiers in number and gender. There are three genders in Italian masculine, feminine and (I just barely learned this) neuter. Gender acts like noun classes, but has loose connections with actual gender. Most male people are masculine, and most female people are feminine. There are exceptions. For example, all pilots are masculine, and all people are feminine (even a group of males). Other than that, gender acts mostly as an arbitrary noun class to which things are assigned. Neuter objects are rare. There are only traces of neuter in Italian, remnants of its Latin heritage, being mostly contained with the body parts. Neuter objects act like male objects in the singular, but feminine objects in the plural. Romanian has a similar residual neuter --- you might discuss this with Jonah. Note that it is not the subject that is agreeing with the verb, but the verb that is agreeing with the subject. Right --- that is what we mean by subject-verb agreement. The three verb types inherit from the verb-lex. I created a new ALTS value, called VERB-CLASS that stored the type of verb it was. Since many of the conjugations of `ere' and `ire' verbs are actually the same, I put them together in a subtype. There are two direct children of the type verb-class – `are' and `non-are'. `non-are' in turn had two children, `ere' and `ire' verbs. Nice.